Professional critics of the news media would seem to be the
least likely subject for news reports. Why would the media
elevate their critics to prominence and perhaps damage their
reputation? Five years ago, Newsweek media writer Jonathan Alter
dismissed critics on the right and left: "What you realize is
these people aren't really interested in media criticism. What
they're doing, often, is just ax-grinding for a political view
in the guise of media criticism."

The media did not apply this logic to Steven Brill, who debuted his journalism review Brill's Content with press releases on June 13. When asked on Today
June 15 if the magazine was a "positive step for consumers of
journalism," Alter replied: "I do. I generally think if we're
going to dish it out in the media, we have to be willing to
take it when it comes to criticism, and a lot of people look
awfully bad in this story." What made Brill different?

His direct-mail sales package declared war: "Name the
industry that, when it comes to power, lack of accountability,
arrogance, and making money in the name of sacred
constitutional rights, actually makes lawyers look good...The media."
That and the magazine's high-finance launch gained him one early
booking on the Today show.

But Brill's first issue didn't create a TV news frenzy for
criticizing the media, but because it contained a very
partisan, one-sided, Clinton-echoing cover story attacking
independent counsel Ken Starr. In a 24,000-word article titled
"Pressgate," Brill sounded like Alter's description of
"ax-grinding for a political view in the guise of media
criticism." He charged Starr with Aunethical if not illegal"
leaks of secret grand jury testimony, even claiming Starr was
the law-breaker, not Clinton: "There is a lot more evidence of
Starr and some of his deputies committing this [leaking] felony than
there is of the President or Vernon Jordan committing a felony."

A Sunday Smash. Brill also asserted "the press seems to have
become an enabler of Starr's abuse of power." That's a curious
charge considering the attention Brill received. Within hours
of a Saturday New York Times Web dispatch, the alleged
Starr-enabling press invited Brill to a William Ginsburg-style
Sunday morning parade for his allegations: NBC's Today, CBS's Face the Nation, CNN's Late Edition, and Fox News Sunday.
Brill's interviews focused primarily on the Starr vs. Clinton
angle, not media performance, and Brill did not divert the
networks from the anti-Starr line.

What About Brill? While they didn't ask about their own
reports, network stars didn't refrain from asking Brill about
his lack of focus on White House tactics. On CBS's Face the Nation,
Gloria Borger wondered: "Ken Starr's people might say that the
media had been manipulated in fact by the White House on this
story." Bob Schieffer added: "Do you think in fact this has
helped Ken Starr because his poll ratings, when you go out
around the country, if he was using the media in this way it does not
seem to have helped him."

But the Sunday night newscasts matched the White House spin.
On ABC, Carole Simpson announced: "Independent Counsel Kenneth
Starr has admitted in an interview released today that he and
his office were the source of some of the leaks about his
investigation into President Clinton. The news may come as no surprise
in Washington, but the fact that he said it -- that's another
matter." On CBS, Bob Schieffer trumpeted how "Steven Brill
drops a bombshell." On NBC, law professor Paul Rothstein
insisted: "If there's a lot more under the surface, it could
lead to possible dismissal of Kenneth Starr."

Skeptical coverage of Brill's partisan background was very
slow to appear. By Monday morning, conservatives were sending
around Federal Election Commission records showing Brill had
donated $2,000 to the Clinton-Gore campaign, as well as more than
$9,000 to other liberal Democrats, such as Rep. Charles Schumer
(D-N.Y.). CNN and the Fox News Channel reported it that night,
but the Big Three networks never mentioned it on the evening
shows. ABC's Good Morning America and CBS This Morning
touched on it, but despite Brill's repeated appearances on
NBC, they never reported Brill's Democratic donations until Meet the Press host Tim Russert brought it up six days later.

Inept Starr?On Monday night, the networks again loaded
negatives on Starr. Dan Rather referred to Starr's "secret
briefings." But the reporters knew the contacts occurred, so if
they were so newsworthy why didn't anyone report them months
ago? On ABC, substitute anchor Charles Gibson insisted this
feeding frenzy was all Ken Starr's fault, as if the network
news producers had nothing to do with it: "By admitting he did
talk to reporters hasn't Kenneth Starr handed the White House an
enormous political opportunity?" On Tuesday, Ken Starr answered Brill
with a stinging 19-page rebuttal on the facts and the law. The
networks covered the story -- all except ABC's World News Tonight, which never mentioned it.

As the week wore on Brill showed up on CNN's Larry King Live, and MSNBC's The News with Brian Williams. Brill appeared on the Today show on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday, and then on the next Sunday's Meet the Press.
Brill received more publicity from the networks in a single
week than other media critics had gained in decades.

What About Walsh? None of the TV stories offered much
historical perspective. Reporters suggested prosecutors like
Lawrence Walsh talked to reporters regularly, but they did not
mention controversies over Walsh's leaking of grand jury
testimony. Mark Levin, a former attorney for Attorney General Ed
Meese, remembered Walsh's treatment of grand jury testimony in the
February 16 Washington Times: "Before Mr. Walsh's final
report on his Iran-Contra investigation was released to the
public, I filed several motions with the Special Division
overseeing Mr. Walsh's investigation objecting to, among other
things, over 600 hundred references to secret grand jury
testimony. Remarkably, some of the same journalists and pundits
who are now decry alleged leaks of grand jury information in
the investigation of Bill Clinton -- leaks which they and Mr.
Clinton place at Mr. Starr's door without any substantiation or hard
evidence -- were not as worried about the sanctity of the grand
jury process during the Iran-Contra investigation. In fact, the
Society of Professional Journalists, among others, filed an
emergency motion with the Special Division demanding 'full
disclosure' of Mr. Walsh's final report -- including grand jury
testimony and allegations of criminal misconduct."

Other Angles? The networks failed to devote a fraction of the
Brill coverage to other scandal developments less favorable to
the President. On June 12, Los Angeles Times reporters
David Willman and Ronald Ostrow found that Deputy White House
Counsel Bruce Lindsey was contacting potential witnesses in the
Lewinsky probe: "After reviewing Lindsey's actions, a federal
judge has sharply questioned why a lawyer on the government
payroll was doing this kind of sleuthing....'The court questions the
propriety of the President utilizing a government attorney as his
personal agent in a personal attorney-client relationship,'
Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson
wrote....Independent counsel Kenneth Starr wants to know what
Lindsey said during his contacts and whether Lindsey crossed
the line from innocuous fact-finding to implicitly coaching a
witness' testimony." Network coverage? Zero.

Brill ended his article with a list of recommendations,
including: "No one should read or listen to a media
organization that consistently shows that it is the lapdog of big,
official power, rather than a respectful skeptic." Then no one
should have paid attention to Brill's magazine, which quickly
decided the White House was "not the story" in Monicagate
coverage. But if Brill had spent his first issue criticizing
only the press instead of the prosecutor the press despises, Brill's Content might have joined other media critics sitting behind a stone wall of near-silence on the networks.

NewsBites: Kelly's Heroes

Kelly's Heroes. Spurred by alarmist predictions from
environmentalists, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell demanded that Al Gore
and the federal government do more to save the seas. For the
June 12 Today, O'Donnell accompanied Gore and his fellow
greenies to a summit on the world's oceans in Monterey,
California. On the trip Gore remotely piloted an underwater vehicle to
explore "a place that many believe must be rescued by government
action and money."

Every one of O'Donnell's questions to Gore came from the
left. "The hundreds of scientists who are gathered here know
your passion for the environment but at the same time many of
them feel an urgency even an anger that more hasn't been done."

Man was portrayed as evil: "And still more evidence of man's
interference. Overfishing, that has depleted a third of the
world's fisheries. As someone who is going to run for President
in the not too distant future, are you prepared to take on
those who oppose protecting the environment, those who see protecting
the ocean as maybe harming the livelihoods of those who make a
living here?"

O'Donnell added: "Mr. Gore unveiled the Administration's
plan: $30 million to explore the oceans, track climate changes,
preserve endangered coral reefs and clean up polluted waters.
In addition once secret military information, that could help civilian
scientists, will be declassified. Is that enough?...While he
[Gore] got a warm welcome at the ocean summit, some scientists
say the new commitments don't go far enough."

Liberal Book Club. For Time magazine's June 8 issue
celebrating "100 Artists & Entertainers of the Century,"
Senior Writer Paul Gray cited ten books that "changed minds and
lives," most of which sounded like college textbooks excavated from
a liberal's closet.

Gray noted the importance of Anne Frank's diary and Solzhenitsyn's chronicle of Soviet labor camps The Gulag Archipelago,
but the other eight came from liberal icons, like philosopher
John Dewey, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Sigmund Freud, Simone
DeBeauvoir and Rachel Carson. Gray wrote of Carson's Silent Spring:
"Her vivid descriptions of the ensuing damage [of poisonous
fertilizers] to the environment -- including animals, birds and
humans -- made ecologists of her many readers.

Gray listed leftists like economist John Maynard Keynes and his most famous text, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
Gray wrote, "By positing that government spending could revive
sagging economies, Keynes rewrote the rules of free-market
capitalism." Time couldn't concede Keynesianism failed to rewrite the rules of capitalism.

Gray credited Michael Harrington's 1963 work The Other America
for scratching the "ingrained, persistent poverty beneath the
affluent surface of U.S. life...Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty
was launched by Harrington's book." Harrington wrote, "There
is only one institution in the society capable of acting to end poverty.
That is the federal government." Time ignored right-leaning life-changing literature like Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, or even Witness C by Whittaker Chambers, a former editor of Time magazine.

Military Modesty? On June 9, a front page Washington Post headline announced: "Army Plans Modest Makeover of Combat Divisions." Post staff
writer Bradley Graham explained: "The army has decided to trim
troop strength in the 18,000-soldier divisions by a modest 13
percent."

But when the Republican Congress wanted to slow the rate of increase in Medicare and Medicaid spending, the Post incorrectly labeled the legislation as containing "huge," "massive," and "large" cuts. In a 1996 MediaWatch study of print media coverage of Republican Medicare proposals, the Post led all publications surveyed with 397 uses of "cuts" and its variants in 370 stories. In the June 30, 1995 Post,
reporter Judith Havemann suggested: "Think of the upcoming
battle for Medicaid as though it were the battle of Manila,"
with more than 100,000 dead Filipino civilians. "The battle
received little attention despite its enormous impact. The same
thing could happen to Medicaid."

Keeping Quiet on Clinton's China Trip

Networks Provide Silence on Fundraising, Missile Scoops

Isn't arming a communist nation with missile technology and
accepting donations from communist military officials worth a
few minutes of network air time? President Clinton left for
China with very little media emphasis on his China scandals -
either the illegal campaign contributions or the waivers for satellite
technology. Since June 5, the networks offered almost nothing on
developments reported by newspapers.

The only TV updates on the missile scandal came on June 11.
CNN's Wolf Blitzer and NBC's Claire Shipman alluded to that
day's Washington Post report by John Mintz on how a
newly inaugurated Clinton dropped his campaign pledge and endorsed
Bush's policy of allowing satellite deals "despite evidence that
China had sold ballistic missile parts to Pakistan,
declassified White House documents show." Also ignored:

June 13: New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth
found: "For the past two years, China's military has relied on
American-made satellites sold for civilian purposes to transmit
messages to its far-flung army garrisons, according to highly
classified intelligence reports. The reports are the most
powerful evidence to date that the American government knew that
China's army was taking advantage of the Bush and Clinton
administrations' decisions to encourage sales of technology to Asian
companies."

June 16: Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz
found: "China is discussing sales of missile test equipment to
Iran and is helping Libya develop its own missile program...
The reports contradict administration claims that Beijing has
improved its record on weapons proliferation."

June 18: Gerth reported in The New York Times
that the U.S. was backing down on a large satellite deal due to
"American intelligence reports about Shen Rongjun, the Chinese
Army General who oversees his country's military satellite
programs...In an unusual arrangement, Hughes Space and
Communications hired General Shen's son, a dual citizen of Canada and
China, to work on the project as a manager... Father and son were
both directly involved in the project, and American officials
said the intelligence reports said the General was pressing his
son to move it forward."

June 20:The Washington Post relayed another
allegation from Johnny Chung, that Democratic officials knew
they were accepting illegal Chinese money. At least that
disclosure generated a CNN story, but just 19 seconds on the CBS Evening News and nothing on ABC and NBC.

"Damaged by CNN", Says One of
Network's Own'

CNN "damaged" the U.S. and helped Saddam Hussein with a
"Hitlerian" program alleging the U.S. used deadly nerve gas
against defecting soldiers in 1970 Laos. So contended CNN's very own
military affairs consultant, Perry Smith, after viewing the June 7
premiere of NewsStand: CNN & Time.

Two weeks after the original report narrated by Peter
Arnett, co-host Jeff Greenfield acknowledged the controversy
and how "CNN's military consultant, retired General Perry
Smith, resigned in protest over that story. Other voices have been heard
calling that story into doubt. We take these voices
seriously." But CNN hardly conveyed the depth of Smith's anger
or their efforts to cover it up.

Howard Kurtz reported in the June 17 Washington Post that
"Smith quit after failing to convince Tom Johnson, Chairman of
the CNN News Group, that the network needed to retract the
story" which was also published in Time magazine. "'I
can't work for an organization that would do something like this and not
fess up to it,' Smith said yesterday."

Kurtz explained how Smith found the story lacking: "Smith
flew 130 combat sorties over Laos from 1968 to 1969 and said he
never heard of lethal gas being used. He said he has consulted
such former high-ranking military officials as Colin Powell and Norman
Schwarzkopf, who assured him that no nerve gas was used by the
United States during the war. Smith quoted Schwarzkopf as
calling the allegation 'ridiculous.' Smith also tracked down
two pilots who delivered gas to Laos that day from an air base
in Thailand. Both said they had carried non-lethal tear gas,
not poisonous nerve gas."

Kurtz relayed this condemnation from the man who spent years
on the inside: "'CNN has damaged the United States of America
quite seriously,' Smith said. Referring to Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein, he said: 'Saddam can now accuse America of hypocrisy and
use CNN as a source.'" Smith told Washington Times reporter
Jennifer Harper the next day: "CNN vowed they would never sink to
tabloid journalism, that they would be honest and
straight-forward. Then they air this story, which is almost
Hitlerian in concept."

But if CNN, which demands openness from everyone else, had its way, Smith would never have spoken. WorldNetDaily
Editor Joe Farah learned that CNN threatened the retired Air
Force Major General with a lawsuit if he kept talking: "Smith
was told by CNN lawyers, in no uncertain terms, to shut up."

Pounding the Primitives

"Seldom has a religious statement been so misconstrued," assessed Newsweek
religion writer Kenneth Woodward after seeing the media
reaction to the adding of a new plank to the official "Baptist
Faith and Message." Dan Rather, for instance, declared on the
June 10 CBS Evening News: "New changes in the church's
official formal statement of beliefs are sparking big debate
today across religious boundaries. Southern Baptist leadership now takes
the view that quote, 'a wife is to submit graciously to her
husband's leadership.' CBS's Bob McNamara has chapter and verse
on this controversial interpretation of a woman's place."

As Woodward explained in the June 22 issue, the "Apostle
Paul set forth rules for godly family relationships. 'Wives, be
subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord,' runs a
typical passage that later became sacred scripture. 'Husbands, love your
wives and never treat them harshly,' he continued." But, he
observed, "when delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention
passed a resolution saying that a wife should 'submit
graciously to her husband's leadership' -- a paraphrase of Paul
-- the media reacted as if the Baptists were promoting heresy.
From a secular perspective, they were."

The Baptist statement, Woodward pointed out, "twice
mentioned the equality of husbands and wives," but "this was
barely noted in media reports." Indeed, of the network stories, only
ABC's Peggy Wehmeyer told viewers: "The husband and wife are of
equal worth before God" and "a husband is to love his wife as
Christ loved the church."

Instead of bringing understanding of religious doctrines to
their viewers as Woodward had to his readers, NBC propounded a
nefarious interpretation. Leading into a clip from the Dean of
the Wake Forest Divinity School, reporter George Lewis brusquely
charged: "The Southern Baptists quote the Bible, the Book of
Ephesians, to back up their contention that women should follow
men, but other theologians point out that in the 19th century
the Southern Baptists used the same scripture to justify
slavery."

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